News written by Matti Robinson (August, 2018)

Once upon a time the browser known as Firefox was one of the hottest tech companies in the world. It was on its way to dethroning the great Internet Explorer, and it seemed inevitable.

Now a decade later the Mozilla browser seems to be a blip on the radar while Chrome, a browser that wasn't even on the radar when Firefox was starting its rise to the top. There are some signs of life within Mozilla, most notably perhaps the "super-fast" Quantum CSS engine.

Now Mozilla has revealed their latest, and perhaps most radical approach to claw back marketshare: anti-tracking. New blog post details how the company is looking to preserve the browsing experience in the face of websites tracking their users' every move (read: ad tracking).

In fact, Mozilla is going to be offering a complete block to all tracking from advertiser by default. This means that you won't have to download, or even turn on, an ad blocker. All third-party cookies trying to track your browsing will be blocked by default, straight out of the box.

Behind the closed doors there are a lot of things Apple is developing. However, the company is super secretive and careful about their upcoming products. One might have been revealed nonetheless.

Reuters reports, that Apple has closed an acquisition of a company called Akonia Holographics, and, as you might guess, they make holographic displays.

Why is this relevant, you may ask. Well, Apple has been rumored to be working on a new product that would expand their augmented reality effort outside iPhones and iPads. Akonia's displays happen to be the type of see-through displays you'd like to use in an AR headset.

Akonia Holographics was launched in 2012 by researchers in the field of holographics. At first they were developing storage solutions but quickly saw the promise of the technology in displays and especially AR needs.

HoloMirror is one of around 200 patented inventions of the company, and could indeed be the basis of an upcoming Apple AR glasses.

Apple's acquisition comes as Akonia was looking for an investor to secure the next round of investment. It is, however, unclear when the transaction was finished.

27 years ago, on the 25th of August in 1991 to be exact, a student from University of Helsinki posted on a newsgroup seeking for feedback for what he called a hobby project.

That is of course Linux, the hobby project started by Linus Torvals, that has since conquered the world. In the original post Linus was looking for feedback for fellow Minix users. He had been working on his replacement for Minix since April, and was ready to get it out there.

It obviously still took a while before Linux was ready for a proper spotlight, but the cat was out of the bag.

Linux grew into the largest open source project ever seen and the most adopted operating system. Even though originally it was perhaps meant for desktop computers, that is probably the only form of computing it hasn't dominated.

From the tiniest computers, the ones in your fridges and routers, to the largest supercomputers there is no competition. And of course nowadays it is in 2 billion pockets worldwide thanks to Android, Google's mobile OS built on Linux.

There is no other project as important to the open source philosophy as Linux. And the OS practices what they preach, as over 99% of the source code is now by someone else than the original creator.

As you might know, camera company RED has been working on their own smartphone for a few years now. We first heard of this device now more than a year ago when they officially announced it.

The phone that promises a modular design with unforeseen camera prowess and a holografic display was supposed to ship early 2018 but we had to wait until a couple weeks ago to learn that RED was finally getting the Hydrogen ready to ship. According to the company the first pre-orders will land in October and Hydrogen should be available to all in November, at least in the cheaper Aluminum version in both black and silver.

Mind you cheap for RED isn't cheap for many others, including Apple. The Aluminum version costs $1249, and Titanium version that is supposed to ship early next year, is a few hundred more.

Anyway, we've known all this for a while now, but we haven't previously seen are the actual press photos of the actual device. Previously we've had to rely on 3D renders, but now you can feast your eyes on these beautiful pictures.

Without further ado, I give you RED Hydrogen One in all it's peculiar glory.

The leading quadrocopter – perhaps more commonly known as drones &Ndash; manufacturer, DJI, has released two new models. The second generation of Mavic drones consists of Mavic 2 Pro and Mavic 2 Zoom.

The latter is the more affordable one that also comes with an 2X optical zoom. The camera setup offers 24 mm to 48 mm optical conversion which allows you to get closer up footage with a push of a button.

Pro version on the other hand features a Hasselblad branded camera system with an impressive one inch and 20 megapixel sensor. Adjustable aperture is said to range from f/2.8 to f/11. Mavic 2 Pro also has an improved color grading support with the new 10-bit DLOG-M profile.

Both drones capture video in 4K with h.265 compression and Mavic 2 Pro support HDR photos that combine several photos in one high dynamic one. They also have an improved, omnidirectional, obstacle sensing.

You can learn more about the duo by watching DJI's own video below. As for the price, DJI Mavic 2 Pro starts at $1449 and Mavic 2 Zoom at $1249.

Nvidia finally revealed the first gamer cards from the new generation of GPUs earlier this week. The GeForce RTX 2000 series shares one major difference to the previous generation which might need some explaining.

For years Nvidia has had GeForce GPUs, and for many of those years, lately, the GeForce's were accompanied with a (faux) acronyms like GTX. Well, this time around Nvidia has changed the acronym to RTX, and this time around it kind of means something.

So RTX is what makes the new generation, the 2000 series, special. It all comes down to the RT Core that is a new processing unit in Turing architecture that takes care of ray tracing. Obviously, thus the RT is both RT Core and RTX.

So this technique in producing light and shadow effect in games has been majorly improved. But what does it exactly mean? Many times has Nvidia explained this in Giga Rays/s and so on, but that doesn't really tell you what it looks like.

Well, thanks to DICE, the developer of the upcoming Battlefield V, we have now real-time gameplay footage to feast our eyes on. As you can see, the differences are huge between RTX on and RTX off.

Google is planning to revamp Chrome's UI a little in less than two weeks. The search giant's own browser will get an update to its 69th version on September 4 which will aim to improve the user experience.

The user interface will be changing no matter what version you use, be it desktop or mobile, and will include updated graphics in terms of colors and shapes of the elements. Google is moving towards what it calls Material Design, a design language that is playful with rounded corners and easy to approach in its simplicity.

The design isn't anything new really, many of Google's websites and services already sport the look that was originally developed in 2014, but Chrome has been lacking behind a bit.

In addition to new look and some changes in the UI, Chrome 69 will also support Windows 10 notifications, Windows 10 touchpad gesture navigation as well as few other minor improvements on Windows.

The biggest changes, though, are heading iOS's way. Chrome 69 on iOS will get a complete UI revamp and things like navigation buttons are going to be moving from the top of the screen to bottom.

As everyone knows, Apple is raking up major profits. One of the more impressive money making machines is the app ecosystem that rains straight into Cupertino coffers without Tim Cook having to lift a finger.

Some aren't that impressed, though, and even want to bypass what the harshest critique could consider rent-seeking. Netflix might not be one of those but nonetheless wants to minimize the fees Apple collects from the in-app purchase of Netflix subscriptions.

Apple's margin for in-app purchases is a very steep 30 percent for the first year, which obviously cuts deep into Netflix's profits. After the first year the royalty share drops to 15 percent.

According to TechCrunch, Netflix is testing a new payment method which involves their own mobile website through which the payment is made. The company is currently trying this out in 33 markets in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

This doesn't mean that you'll be keeping any of the 30 percent Netflix saves. The prices are the same, slowly increasing, slightly region specific ones that you've paid before.

The people selected in this trial will be automatically redirected to the new payment page instead of iTunes when selecting a subscription. The test period is said to end in September, but if all goes well expect the method to be applied more comprehensively.

Microsoft is planning on unveiling a new type of service in the near future called Xbox All Access. The service, like its name suggests, not only gives you access to a extensive game catalog but the game system itself too.

According to a report by The Verge, Microsoft is going to start offering Xbox All Access with both Xbox One S and Xbox One X. The more powerful game console plus the Live Gold and Game Pass it comes with would cost $34.99 on a 24 month contract.

For now it is said that Xbox All Access, which I'm sure will soon be christened XAA or XBAA, is limited to those in the United States but one can expect expansion if people love it.

Smartphones have made the products as a subscription service a huge market, and one could imagine another technology driven product to fare similarly well. For customers the game subscription part makes even more sense, though, since the game prices are relatively high compared to the hardware.

Windows Central writes that the price of the cheaper Xbox One S with the Xbox All Access should be around $22. But that means you'll be missing out on the higher fidelity 4K experience.

Internet Relay Chat, better known by its acronym IRC, is celebrating a birthday. In fact this year the chat protocol is turning 30, University of Oulu, the birthplace of IRC, reports.

IRC was developed in University of Oulu in Finland in the late 80s. The messaging platform was created in the Computer Science department as a replacement for their BBS-based messaging platform called MultiUser Talk, or MUT.

In August of 1988, exact date unknown, Computer Science student Jarkko Oikarinen released IRC, both server and client software, that he had developed over the summer. The first server was run by a Sun-3 computer in the Department of Information Processing Science lab.

If you aren't familiar with IRC, it's a text-based real-time chat software where users can create and join channels for example based on their interests or group of friends.

Obviously the implementation of IRC was very successful since its been used for 30 years and continues to be used, although in much more limited fashion compared to, say, mid- to late 90s.

Modern chat software, including the likes of Slack and Discord, borrow a lot from the classic channel-based messaging platform.

Nvidia has finally come out and launched the new GeForce RTX series. The company unveiled the new graphics cards, three of them to be exact, at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

After the company released the first product using the new Turing architecture, the $10,000 behemoth RTX 8000, they've now released the real beef. Gamer-oriented RTX 2000 series includes RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and the top dog RTX 2080 Ti.

Each three cards will also come in a Founder Edition version, as expected.

What makes the new GPUs better than the previous GTX generation, you might ask. Well, pretty much everything you need to know is in the R of RTX, and that is ray tracing.

Turing-based GeForce RTX cards have now a separate ray tracing cored, called simply RT Core, that allows the GPU to excel at that specific technique. This makes the calculations on lighting and shadows much faster. That obviously means not only less computing time but potentially much more photorealistic detail.

When it comes to performance not regarding ray tracing, we'll just have to see after the first tests, but for now we can assume there's at least a slight boost.

Maybe Apple has been focusing too much on the iPhone? Especially recently people have seemed to become less enamored about Apple's computer lineup.

Past few Macbook generations have been riddled with problems, most notably with the keyboards, and many of the beloved models have been forgotten altogether.

One of these is the tiny media powerhouse that is Mac mini. Fortunately, this Fall we are expecting a refresh in that department, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports.

Possibly to be unveiled in October, Apple is said to be releasing a few new computers. One of them is the aforementioned Mac mini, and another a replacement for the old MacBook Air.

This new product, whatever its name is, will be a more affordable, likely razor-thin, laptop for the masses. Bloomberg suggests it will feature a new Retine display as well as thinner bezels that bring along a slightly tinier footprint.

When it comes to Mac mini, there's not a lot of detail about specs, but according to the rumors Apple has decided to focus more on professionals and not only the media consuming greater public. However, upgrades to pretty much every technological facet of the computer are expected, after all it's been four years since the previous generation.

Netflix has truly become a force to be reckoned with in the TV industry. For ten years now the company has managed to steal away cable customers with its ever-increasing content library and more expensive original programming.

Over the years Netflix has also improved the streaming technology, the performance and functionality of the service. This requires a lot of A/B testing and most of those tests will never see the light of day amongst the general public.

Netflix prides itself the king of binge, and the nonstop action is one of the more important reasons why people love Netflix over the old world competitors. Now Netflix is testing something that is definitely one of the most controversial features we've heard of from the streaming service.

The company has been offering test subjects promotional videos between episodes, which, for many, changes everything. When you are watching Netflix you just want to go through episode after episode with no intrusion.

However, the videos aren't the traditional kind of commercials you might see on Hulu for example, they are personalized content from Netflix promoted to the user. So maybe, just maybe, someone could get something out of them. After all you might find your next favorite show from the promo videos.

As we already knew after their announcement in May, Google is revamping, and even rebranding, their cloud drive solution.

The search giant is trying to unify their cloud services by focusing everything under the same brand, Google One. This means that the cloud storage known as Google Drive will be in the future under the Google One umbrella.

This also means that if you're paying for a Google Drive service, you'll be automatically transferred to Google One. And don't worry, the deals are in many cases better.

The cheapest version (100 GB) is still $1.99/mo but there's now also another inexpensive 200 GB and $2.99 option that you couldn't get on the legacy service. The pricier $9.99 option is now 2 TB instead of Google Drive's 1 TB.

With the updated Google One, Google has also improved the cloud storage integration with Gmail and Google Photos. You can also add family members to your plan so you can share the storage efficiently, and get help from Google experts.

Google also promises extra benefits from other Google services, such as Google Play credits.

Smart speakers are one of the most prominent technology trends over the past few years. After Amazon's original Echo, released in 2014, every major technology giant has joined in on the party and released their own voice assistant powered devices.

Now, most notably, we have the Amazon Echo, Google Home as well as Apple HomePod released earlier this year. But how do they compare when it comes to popularity?

Well, Amazon has been leading the pack with quite the margin until now. New 2018 Q2 figures from Strategy Analytics suggest that the lead is quickly narrowing.

Amazon still has the first place with a 41 percent market share but Google is on its heels with 27.6%. Only a year ago Amazon had still three quarters of the market to themselves.

Google has managed to more than quintuple the sales since last year's Q2. Apple hasn't yet made the mark they probably hoped for and still lack behind on the fourth place with a 5.9% marketshare behind the Chinese company Alibaba.

In total smart speaker sales volumes tripled from last years to 11.7 million units. Expect even bigger numbers in the future as the likes of Samsung get theirs on the market.

The first trillion dollar company in the world, Apple, makes fair few different products. Be it the iconic iMac, what seems like a hobby horse Apple TV, or the ultimate money making machine which is obviously the iPhone.

However, in Cupertino they've been very hesitant at engaging in new businesses, and with good results. There might be a few other products that could make a lot of money for Tim Cook and his friends but chances are that most ventures would fail. And that would be unlike Apple.

Behind the scenes Apple is of course developing all kinds of technology and rumors have been suggesting for years that things like Apple car are in development. Now we have more evidence that it actually might be happening, reports AppleInsider.

One of the more revered Apple analysts, Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities, has suggested that Apple is planning on entering the car market with a vehicle in a few years. According to Kuo, Apple Car, or perhaps iCar, will be unveiled in 2023-2025.

His feelings are, and that's pretty much all it is for now, that Apple would not be willing to stay a bystander as the revolution in vehicles is happening. One would expect electric and autonomous vehicles from a technology powerhouse like Apple.

Apple released the seventh beta version of their newest mobile operating system, the iOS 12. Not long after the update shipped yesterday the Cupertino giant had to, however, take it back.

Users were reporting major problems with the update and Apple decided to pull the update. Many of the beta users were complaining about performance issues that struck right after updating their device.

Reports said apps are slow to start and the lock screen animations are sluggish, laggy or can even halt altogether. Some have also complained about problems in the Notification Center.

Even though the problems occurred in a pre-production beta version, Apple has decided that they are too severe to wait for another update. That is understandable as testing the platform would be hard if it keeps freezing and lagging.

Apple did not pull the update from all channels, though. Over-the-air (OTA) updates were stopped but developers can still access iOS 12 beta 7 manually.

The leading GPU manufacturer Nvidia has finally gave us some Turing news, and to start with it has revealed its most powerful professional GPU.

Turing is of course the company's new architecture that it will apply not only in the new Quadro RTX 8000 already revealed but also the upcoming, more gamer-friendly, GPUs that are expected from Gamescom next week.

Aforementioned Quadro RTX 8000 is a powerhouse of a GPU that professionals of all ilk working with extreme cases of graphics intensive workloads would appreciate. The unit includes 567 Tensor cores that have been upgraded to Turing specs.

That includes a dedicated RT Core unit which is responsible for raytracing calculations. Obviously that'll give the other processing cores more time to focus on other tasks whether they'd be AI calculations or more general purpose tasks.

Speaking of general purpose tasks, there are 4608 CUDA cores on board the new RTX 8000, and a completely insane 48 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory.

As you might expect, specs like that don't come cheap. In fact the price for RTX 8000 is an insane $10,000. Worry not, though, there will be more affordable Turing cards in the near future.

The company has teased upcoming gamer GPUs on a YouTube video. Nvidia is expected to release new GPUs at Gamescom on August 20.

Snap was once perhaps the hottest prospects in the messaging startup game but they've fallen quite a bit from their perceived glory. Now they've once again been trusted with hundreds of millions of foreign investments.

Thanks to Facebook, and others, who've been copying Snapchat's innovative features, and surpassing them in other ways, Snapchat has been struggling to stay relevant and afloat. A $353 million net loss previous quarter is just one of the signs of the waning platform.

Fortunately now Saudi prince Al-Waleed Talal has put forth $250 million to acquire 2.3% stake in the company.

Snap is nowadays known not only from its self-destructive messages, and AR filters called World Lenses that were released last year, but also social media sunglasses, 2016 launched Spectacles, that were revamped earlier this year.

Snapchat has currently just under 200 million users while Facebook-owned Instagram has recently surpassed a billion users according to Statista.

Perhaps the most hyped Virtual, and by Virtual I mean Augmented, Reality headset, Magic Leap, ever has been released to the public. However, the Microsoft HoloLens -like AR headset is by no means everybody's entertainment device, for few reasons.

Magic Leap can be now ordered in six cities in the United States: Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. But even if you live in one of these places, the price might put you off. See, the price for what seems to still be a fairly exclusive product, is $2,295, not including VAT.

If you still want to shell out the cash, you might want to know what you are spending your money on. The hotly anticipated AR device comes in a three pieces with the headset itself being one of them obviously. You also get one touchpad controller as well as the computing part of the operation called the Lightpack.

Included in the Lightpack is Nvidia's Parker mobile CPU, a GPU based on Pascal architecture, eight gigabytes of RAM and 128 GB flash storage. According to the company the battery can run the device for up to 3 hours at a time, which should be more than enough to tire your eyes.

Connectivity-wise Magic Leap supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2 and USB-C.

AMD has put their newest, and most powerful, addition to Ryzen Threadripper family of CPUs on pre-order. The chip in question is the 32-core and 64-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, the first of the WX series, that was unveiled in June.

Now 2990WX is available for pre-order for those looking for a truly top notch multithread processor. The second generation Threadripper chip includes new Zen+ architecture produced with 12 nm process, but its TR4 socket is supported by current X399 motherboards with a BIOS update.

According to AMD, the new Threadripper 2990WX managed to already snatch the record for Cinebench multithread benchmark, although not with default cooling solution, as you might imagine. The CPU normally clocked at 3.0GHz (and boosted at 4.2GHz) was overclocked to 5.1GHz during the test.

While powerful in all kinds of tasks, this specific family of chips is meant mainly for professional use, be it video rendering or other CPU intensive work, where core and thread counts are important. The price tag is telling as well, as not many PC enthusiasts are willing to shell out $1799 for a CPU.

Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX pre-orders are now open and it'll take another week for it to hit the stores on August 13. The cheaper $1299 24-core (and 48-thread) 2970WX will be released next month.

Known for its electric cars, Tesla wouldn't be thought as the first company to develop their own microchips. But obviously Tesla's vehicles are just moving computers, and one of the most important parts of that computer happens to be the brains, the artificial intelligence brains.

It's been actually known for quite some time that Tesla is trying to come up with a more cost-efficient and tailored solution than the current Nvidia chips for its cars. Now the company has confirmed that it will be dropping Nvidia in favor of their proprietary AI chips.

Amidst reporting on quarterly results Elon Musk revealed that the homebrew chip will be introduces during next year. According to the Tesla and Space X visionary, it has been developed from the ground up for Tesla's vehicles and according to their needs.

The new chip will be able to handle all the AI calculations unlike many competing chips that require some form of software emulation. This makes Tesla's chip "an order of magnitude" faster than for example the currently used Nvidia chip.

Tesla chip is also backwards compatible so old vehicles could get an AI performance boost with a chip replacement. However, there's no word what the procedure would cost or when it would be available.

Taiwanese contract chip manufacturer TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) has had to shut down some of its factories after a virus infected its production lines. The world's largest semiconductor manufacturer builds Apple's system-on-chips, including for the upcoming iPhones expected to be released next month.

According to Bloomberg, TSMC was hit by a virus that crippled some of the company's factories. TMSC representatives have denied that the systems were compromised by a hacker but there is currently no explanation how the virus entered the systems.

For TSMC the timing is horrible, since it is currently trying to crank out as many Apple chips as possible for its most important customer before the release of upcoming iPhones.

The company did not, however, disclose if the affected factories were producing chips for iPhones and what kind of financial damage was inflicted by the virus. As the investigation matures TSMC hopes to answer more questions after the weekend.

Some factories are already back to normal but others with more severe problems are expected to take at least until Sunday to reboot.

Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhones almost two years ago with the release of iPhone 7. Whether it was at the time a brave move, as they spun it, or just a silly design choice it up to you.

However, $1 trillion Cupertino giant is not backing away from the strategy, rumors suggest. They plan to move further away from wired headphones towards a truly wireless future.

Barclays research team has been suggesting since early this year that Apple will be getting rid of the headphone jack dongle from the next iPhone. Now Cirrus Logic, a supplier for the headphone adapter, has all but confirmed to Barclays that this indeed is the case, MacRumors reports.

Apple is expected to release three new iPhone models next month, all of which are likely to not have headphone jack. Now users with traditional wired headphones might have to shell out some extra cash to use their preferred audio equipment.

The adapter isn't fortunately too expensive, currently at $9, and many of the current or previous generation iPhone users already have one adapter, but it is surely going to stir up some controvery if indeed Apple decides to exclude it from the retail box.

A couple years ago Nintendo released what seemed like a silly promotional product, a mini version of the good old Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.

After NES Classic other companies followed suit, including Atari (although their approach is way different), but it was the NES Classic with the strong lineup of classic retro games that caught all the attention. So much so that it was sold out almost immediately.

Huge demand meant that the prices rose to ridiculous amounts in the second-hand market. Now, two years later, the NES Classic is back and the supply has been far better.

The demand is still there which is proven by the fact that according to market research firm NPD it has outsold all other consoles, including the current generation favorites Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.

This even though NES Classic was only sold for a few days during the analyzed period (June 2018). Of course one has to remember that NES Classic costs $59 while the others go for several hundreds.

So as the tweet by NPD analyst Mat Piscatella below shows, NES Classic outsold PS4 by unit numbers but not in dollar sales. If you want to know more about the numbers of both software and hardware sales head to Twitter and read the thread.

Apple has reached new heights that no company before it has reached. Cupertino-based tech giant closed the day yesterday with a share price of $207.39 which means it surpassed the magical and revolutionary (add other Apple-like superlatives) $1 trillion market cap.

Who would've guessed that making iPhones is such a good business model? Or as someone put it, buying low and selling high seems to pay off. Joking aside, Apple has done something no company has managed and to celebrate Tim Cook sent a memo to Apple employees reiterating what is important.

According to the note Apple's number one priority is customer. While people should be excited and happy about the milestone, they should remember that it is just a measurement of success in one, albeit super tangible, respect.

Obviously Cook knew the memo would be read by many outside the company and promoting a view that customer always comes first is good for the business in the long run. Not surprisingly Steve Jobs gets a mention as the visionary founder who instilled Apple with the values it holds.

And here's the letter Apple CEO Tim Cook sent to company's employees after hitting the historic milestone:

Team,

Today Apple passed a significant milestone. At our closing share price of $207.39, the stock market now values Apple at more than $1 trillion. While we have much to be proud of in this achievement, it's not the most important measure of our success. Financial returns are simply the result of Apple's innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values. Read more...